New prostate cancer tracer developed by CDT student

An easy to produce prostate cancer tracer, which allows patients to be staged more accurately, has been developed by final year CDT student, Jennifer Young.

The new tracer was developed with support from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Biomedical Research Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and King’s College London.

It can be made very quickly and easily in a radio-pharmacy, meaning that smaller hospitals and clinics can produce it. It is hoped that this will mean more patients will have access to high-quality lifesaving scans:

The tracer Jennifer has developed will give more patients access to potentially lifesaving scans. The low-cost and relatively straightforward production process means that smaller hospitals and not just the biggest specialist hospitals can produce it for their patients. We hope this will be the first of several tracers based on this technology for application to other cancers, not just prostate - Professor Philip Blower (Jennifer's Supervisor, Kings)

For the paper that covered the synthesis of the radiotracer up to the pre-clinical stage, Jennifer was selected as a recipient of the Alavi–Mandell Award. The award is given to individuals who were the first author of a paper published in the JNM, were trainees at the time the published work was carried out, and made a major contribution to the completion of the work. The tracer has now gone on to complete a phase 1 clinical trial.

This work receieved financial support from: Financial support: King’s College London and Imperial College London EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging (EP/L015226/1); Theragnostics Limited; KCL and UCL Comprehensive Cancer Imaging Centre funded by CRUK and EPSRC, MRC and DoH (England); NIHR Biomedical Research Centre awarded to Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with King’s College London and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.